Re: Sharing bed with infant can be fatal, warns top coroner, June 5.

I was most dismayed to read this story. Not because I fear for the life of my baby, but because the coroner’s conclusions are not supported by the existing research on the topic.

There are no documented cases of a healthy, nursing mother smothering the baby she sleeps with. Many more babies die alone in cribs than with their parents.

The problem is quite clearly not with “co-sleeping” and bed-sharing in general, but with “unsafe sleeping environments.” There is a great deal of difference between a safe, planned co-sleeping environment, and “couches, armchairs” and “surface(s) cluttered with … objects.”

The article mentions “controversy,” but offers little information from the other side. There is a casual reference to an “author” named James McKenna. Professor McKenna is the director of the “Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory” at the University of Notre Dame. And what does he say about sleeping with your baby? “During my many years of studying infant-parent co-sleeping/bed-sharing, I am unaware of even one instance in which, under safe social and physical conditions, a mother, aware that her infant was in bed with her, ever suffocated her infant.”

There is an admission that “further research… is warranted.”

Pediatrician Dr. William Sears, a widely respected parenting expert, writes that “not only is sleeping with your baby safe, but it is actually much safer than having your baby sleep in a crib. Research shows that infants who sleep in a crib are twice as likely to suffer a sleep-related fatality (including SIDS) than infants who sleep in bed with their parents.” Canadian breastfeeding authority Dr. Jack Newman devotes a section of his book to encouraging nursing mothers to sleep with their babies, titled “You will not roll over on your baby.”

If 12.8 per cent of parents can be persuaded to admit to routinely sharing their beds with their babies we can easily conclude that: a lot of parents are co-sleeping; a lot of parents will be unnecessarily frightened by these unscientific reports; and given 41 deaths, advice on how to keep babies safe in beds is called for. Dramatic warnings of fatal bed-sharing must emphasize the usual causes of intoxicated parents, excess bedding, and other obvious hazards. It should be made quite clear that of all the worries that accompany a new baby, murder via maternal cuddles is not something that need be one of them for parents taking basic safety precautions.

It should also be emphasized that cribs are just pieces of furniture, not magical life-sustaining apparatuses. Many infants who die sleeping die in cribs, bouncers, playpens, etcetera. “Little, wee vulnerable” children are not somehow protected by sleeping alone and it takes a strange agenda to suggest otherwise.

Source: Ottawa Citizen, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/3l5o8f

You think a tween is too young to have a MySpace page?

That debate is so 10 minutes ago.

Soon, there will be a site meant for children ages birth to 5. Think of it as Facebook for toddlers.

On June 24, TotSpot (totspot.com) is scheduled to make its national debut. On it, moms and dads can create free pages about their children, posting photos and videos and dates of their first smiles, first steps and first day of kindergarten.

Just like Facebook.

TotSpot is the brainchild of — who else? — two 20-something Harvard grads from the class of 2007. They were convinced the world needs yet another social networking site, this one for the bib-and-bottle-tending crowd.

“The network of friends that you would share things with professionally could be different from the network of people you want to share stuff about your children,” explains Adam Katz, who is from Long Island.

Katz started the site with Michael Broukhim of Los Angeles, whom he met at the Harvard University campus newspaper. The two wanted to do something entrepreneurial after graduation. “We got a sense parents wanted a very simple and easy way to share stuff with their friends,” Katz says.

There won’t be ads on the children’s pages; Katz says they hope to profit from turning sites into keepsake books.

Seven-month-old Maddox Wohl of Plainview already has a page, because his mother is one of the people who was invited to preview the site as it works out its kinks for its national launch.

“I absolutely love it,” says Maddox’s mom, Meredith Allison-Wohl, 35. “I really wish I’d thought of it. My family’s always bugging me, ‘Send pictures, send pictures.’ ” She says she feels more comfortable posting videos of Maddox to share with far-flung relatives on TotSpot than when she posted them on YouTube.

Only invited family and friends can view the page and its contents, Katz says. Users don’t have to worry about that competitive preschool finding out their toddler didn’t walk until he was 2, for instance. Or that their child went wild and smeared cupcake icing on her midriff at a birthday party.

In a way, TotSpot is formatted like an online baby book. Allison-Wohl posted, for instance, the first day that Maddox stood up. She’ll be able to post his first word and fill in an online growth chart.

All the people who are Maddox’s “friends” on TotSpot can get an e-mail notification every time Allison-Wohl posts something new. If he goes to Gymboree class, for instance, she can post pictures and tag other TotSpot users to let them know if their children are in any of the photos. “It’s addicting,” Allison-Wohl says.

Larry Rosen, author of Me MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), said TotSpot “does what the Internet is supposed to do — which is to find ways to bring people closer.”

It also helps parents to understand what social networking is all about — in preparation for the days when their now-babies will become 7- and 8-year-olds who want to play on their own sites, such as Club Penguin. “There is so much fear that has built up around social networking,” Rosen says, which this can help to dispel.

The network could help parents looking for a support group, says Justine Cassell, director of The Center for Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. The center examines the impact of new technologies on society.

If a parent posts a notice that her child just took her first step, it’s not likely that viewers will respond with, “So? Every child walks,” Cassell says. Instead, they will offer their congratulations. “That’s going to feel good to the parents.”

The friends and families? They are totally on board. Well, at least speaking for Maddox’s grandmother in New Jersey.

“What, are you kidding? I love it,” says Maddox’s maternal grandmother, Laurie Allison, of Barnegat, N.J. “I play the videos constantly whenever I just want a little cheering up.”

Source: Seattle Times, United States
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2004462811_kidnetwork07.html

When it was time for Sara Hammel’s son, David, to oust his pacifiers, she let the Easter Bunny handle it.

Hammel, of McCandless, and her husband, Michael, had David — who was almost 3 at the time, and is now 8 — gather up all of his “dewies” and place them in empty plastic Easter eggs. He placed the eggs, along with some carrots, out on the night before Easter. The next morning, David was delighted to find a giant Easter egg filled with Matchbox toys.

“He totally went along with it. … It was almost amazing,” says Sara Hammel, 30. “He never asked about it — not ever, not once.”

In early childhood, giving up pacifiers — often called “binkies” — is a major step in growing up, but it’s not always easy for the child or parent. The baby’s pacifier serves as an outlet for sucking instincts, and a source of comfort and soothing, experts say. Yet, when the time comes to outgrow it, if the parents do it right, most children do surprisingly well. Making the change can be quite simple, and done either cold-turkey style or through a gradual weaning process.

“It’s something many parents put off doing; they think the child is going to have a terrible reaction,” says Dr. Lawrence Shapiro. He is a child psychologist in Norwalk, Conn., and author of several parenting books, including “It’s Time to Give Up Your Pacifier.”

“Children are resilient, for the most part,” Shapiro says. “Children may be upset for a day or two, but that’s it. … Parents can take (the pacifier) away, and tell the child, ‘You’re a big boy or big girl, and big boys and big girls don’t suck pacifiers.’ And that should be the end of it.”

Dr. Christopher Luccy, a pediatric dentist in Greensburg, Westmoreland County, recommends that parents eliminate a baby’s pacifiers ideally between the ages of 11 and 13 months — although it’s very common for children to use a pacifier much longer than that.

“Once you get past 11 to 13 months, a pacifier … is not a … necessity, but rather a pathological habit,” Luccy says.

Prolonged pacifier use can cause damage to a child’s facial and jaw growth pattern, and push the teeth out for an awkward bite, resulting in “buck teeth,” he says. Toddlers who use a pacifier for a few years can easily break their teeth when they fall, because of the teeth’s positions.

Shapiro — whose simple picture book about pacifiers is meant to be read by parents and children together — says that children should stop using pacifiers around 1 year old, and by 18 months at the latest. Once children are a year old, they lose the sucking instinct catered to by a pacifier.

“After that, (the pacifier) doesn’t serve any purpose whatsoever, but it’s just a habit,” Shapiro says.

If a child uses a pacifier for too long, he or she can have impaired language development, and be subject to teasing by peers, Shapiro says.

Many parents have found creative and humorous ways to end their children’s pacifier days.

After her son, Ryan’s, 2-year examination with his pediatrician, Jennifer Rametta of Allegheny Township decided to get rid of the pacifiers once and for all. She and her husband, Mike, tied them to a bunch of helium balloons and released them into the sky, while Ryan watched, thinking he was doing a noble deed.

“We said there were babies up on the moon who need the pacifiers more than he did, because he’s a big boy now,” says Jennifer Rametta, 37.

The tactic worked well: Ryan, now 6, only asked about the pacifier when he took his nap that day, then dropped it. Just when his parents were celebrating, though, they saw some of the balloons tangled up around the electric wires outside the house — and later, they found a binky in their flower beds.

Heather and Patrick Brennan of Jeannette, Westmoreland County, also tricked their daughter, Rachel, who is now 6. When they saw a newspaper picture of Patrick Brennan, a law enforcement officer, escorting a prisoner, the couple told Rachel that the man stole her binky from her father and buried it in the woods. They put the clipping on the refrigerator, to remind her.

With their other daughter — Riley, 2 — the couple claimed that the Jeannette Jayhawks, a high-school football team, stole her binkies. Specifically, they said that Terrelle Pryor — the football standout who will play for Ohio State — took the binkies.

“God forbid if she should ever meet him,” says Heather Brennan, 28, laughing. “She’d say, ‘You took my binky!’ ”

Heather Upholster, 36, of Unity, Westmoreland County, says her oldest child — Brenna, who will be 7 on July 5 — was still very attached to her binkies at age 3. When her doctor told her to get rid of the pacifier, Upholster blamed it on a herd of cows in a field they often passed while driving.

“I just kind of played dumb, and said, ‘I don’t know where it went; maybe those cows took it,” she says. Brenna would yell, “No fair! You guys took my binkie!”

“After a few weeks … she forgot all about the binkie and didn’t ask about it,” Upholster says.

For Donna Orris of Port Vue, the birth of her son, Mark, jolted her older daughter — Michele, who was 3 1/2 at the time — out of her dependence on her pacifier.

“All of a sudden, she instantly became the big sister,” says Orris, 66. She used to put several pacifiers in her daughter’s crib, so the tot wouldn’t have to reach too far for one.

“And that was that,” she says.

NO MORE BINKY

If it’s time to retire the old binky, consider this advice from professionals:

• It’s good to begin taking pacifiers away, whether by weaning or cold-turkey methods, when your child is about a year old, and as young as 11 months.

• By the time kids reach 18 months, they definitely are ready to give up the pacifiers entirely.

• Whether to go cold turkey or gradually depends on the individual child and age. Older children, who may have become more dependent on their pacifiers, might do better with a weaning process.

• If you suddenly take the pacifier away, be prepared for a few days of protesting and crying from your child, but don’t give in. Many kids get over it right away.

• If you take the pacifier away gradually, start by telling your kids that it is time to stop using it, except at home, and that soon they won’t need it. A week later, tell them they can only use it at bedtime. On the third week, tell them they are big boys or girls and don’t need it at all.

• When you’re done, throw all pacifiers away.

• Give your child a special stuffed toy to take to bed, to replace the comfort of the pacifier.

• Be consistent. Once you have a good plan, stick to it, and never give the pacifier back.

• Avoid quitting the pacifier during a time of change, like a move, a new school year, or the birth of a new baby.

• Do not give your kid a hard time, even if he or she gives you one.

• Don’t make your child feel bad about wanting the pacifier back; be empathetic.

• Portray a positive attitude; this is a major milestone in your child’s life, like potty-training.

• Emphasize the compliment that your child is now a big boy or big girl, to boost confidence.

TAKE-AWAY METHODS

When you take the pacifier away, these methods may help:

• Break the pacifier by cutting off the nipple, then tell your child that it’s broken and needs to be thrown away.

• Ask your dentist to tell your child that the pacifier is bad for the teeth.

• Give stickers to your kids when they don’t use the pacifier.

• Dip the pacifier in soapy water so that it will taste bad.

• Make up creative stories, like telling your child that the Binky Fairy will come while he or she is sleeping, and leave a stuffed toy and maybe a note.

Source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, PA
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/living/family/s_570626.html

Darling, that was wonderful: British couples reveal the quantity of sex after parenthood may be down but the quality is up

Do people’s sex lives start to fizzle out after they have children? Does their arrival mark the end of romance and the start of fantasising about other sexual partners - or even a night of uninterrupted sleep?

Shining a light on this deeply private area of couple’s lives is not always easy. So when we posted a questionnaire on Times Online, we were not entirely sure what to expect.

So far nearly 1,700 men and women have answered questions that range from how often they have sex and how long it lasts, to how many children they have and whether the children have affected the quality of their sex lives. Many also wrote at length about their own experiences.

David Thompson - the only one of those we contacted who agreed to give his real name - spoke with lyrical nostalgia about a long walk in the woods with his girlfriend. The weather was perfect, no one else was around and they had nothing on their minds but each other; so they made love beneath the trees.

Now aged 37, Thompson is married to his girlfriend and a father of three. “Making love spontaneously outdoors is something we would never do now,” he said. “We’re too busy running after the kids, making sure they don’t beat each other with sticks.”

His experience seemed typical: most of the respondents to our survey agreed that having children meant having less time for love-making. Yet despite recent reports about the rise in sexless marriages, the overwhelming majority still had a sex life – and few complaints about its quality.

“Frequency has gone down because we are both constantly tired and frazzled with the demands of our jobs and looking after the family,” wrote a married mother of two, who said she had sex two to three times a month. “But quality has gone up, as we have got closer after the birth of our child . . . We trust each other more and so are more open with each other.”

In all, 1,675 respondents - 54% of them male - filled in the survey on the Times Online’s Alpha Mummy blog. While not strictly scientific - because the respondents were self-selected - it painted a reassuring picture of what happens to romance after having children. The majority of parents said they had sex more than once a month; and 63% said the frequency of their love-making ranged from several times a week to two to three times a month. For 46%, love-making sessions lasted 20-45 minutes, while 34% made love for up to 20 minutes and 3% for more than an hour.

Tiredness was the chief reason given for having less sex now than before having a family; causes of this included the sheer physical energy needed to look after children, disturbed nights, early starts, pressures at work and general stress.

One pregnant mother, who has one child, said the reason why she was having sex only two or three times a month was, in fact, nothing to do with having a baby. “Running our own business does more damage,” she wrote. Other reasons for less frequent sex included sharing a bed with children or sleeping in separate beds - in some cases so that fathers were not woken up when a baby needed to be breast-fed.

One mother of three complained that it was hard ever to escape from children - “I’m worried about little hands opening bedroom doors,” she wrote.

Sex with his wife was described by one father as “quick, covert, much like a military strike . . . My daughter seems to have been born with a built-in radar which informs her any time my wife and I try to get close . . . even if she’s in the other room . . . at two in the morning”.

Some parents said they stole private moments while the children were playing in the garden or when the nanny was on duty. “We have to make the most of the opportunities, but the quality seems to get better with age and experience,” wrote a father of three, who described sex with his girlfriend as “better than ever” after 13 years together.

It was striking just how many parents had a positive view of their sex lives - whatever the frequency. “The sex we have is really great. It is maybe not as saucy as it was when we first got together, but it is more effective in that we both know what the other likes and what works for us both,” said a mother of one, who has been with her husband for eight years. They still have sex several times a week: “Although sometimes I am tired and think I can’t be bothered, afterwards I always think how much fun it was and am so pleased that I made the effort.”

Another mother, who has three children, said: “Being constantly tired and busy with activities after school made it hard to feel ‘in the mood’. Once the kids were older and more independent, we could return to more intimacy, and now that the kids have left home it is great.”

Some in long-term relationships admitted that the ebb and flow of their sex lives did not necessarily have anything to do with having children.

“We thought children affected our sex life when they were very little; but looking back, it was better then than now,” wrote a mother of two, whose relationship has so far lasted 11 years. “It may be our age, or we may have just got lazy.”

According to Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University and author of Paranoid Parenting, mothers in particular can find parenting a desexualising experience. After a baby is born, he said, “there’s a sense that the baby becomes the priority; the body is given over to the child. And that is sometimes slightly contradictory to the woman as a sexual being”.

Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, says that there can be a tension between “the erotic and the domestic. Family life thrives in an atmosphere of consistency and stability. The erotic crumbles under routine”.

Several respondents recognised these strains in their relationships. “I believe that my partner saw me as a mother/housewife rather than as being a sexually attractive, interesting woman,” said a mother of one.

And a father wrote: “Being in the birthing room was very traumatic for me. Taking second place to our child hurt our sex life . . . I think we both withdrew from the sex part of the relationship.”

One father of two, who had been in a relationship for five years, said: “After the second child, desire just disappeared and never really came back to full strength - and it’s been three years.” The couple’s love-making - two to three times a month - was, however, “great when you get it”.

Another father said that his love life had dwindled to having formulaic sex several times a year: “It was never the right moment so I gave up trying . . .”

On the other hand, many felt that pregnancy and parenthood had put renewed energy into their relationships. “It’s great now because she’s pregnant and has a sex craving,” said a father who has sex about once a week.

Perel said this was not uncommon. “There are lots of women who actually discover through pregnancy, through birth, nursing and bonding with a child, a whole new sense of themselves as women - physically, sexually and sensually.”

The iron bonds of parenthood can often reinforce a relationship, according to Furedi. “Having kids and having some very positive shared experiences bring people together,” he said. “A good sex life for a couple depends on there being a kind of bond, a friendship - it’s what gives you confidence to relax.”

What can be done if the sexual spark between a couple has simply fizzled out? Scheduling time to be alone together is vital, advises Suzi Godson, author of The Sex Book. Perel advises going out for a meal, dancing - anything that the couple will both enjoy. “Just don’t talk about the kids,” she says.

However, one desperate parent asked: but what else is there to talk about by that stage in a relationship?

Source: Times Online, UK
http://tinyurl.com/5a5wbp

Kids are missing out on connection to outdoors

Last week I shared with you some of the benefits to young people of attending summer camp, such as social, decision-making and leadership skills and increased self-esteem.

This week I will share with you another benefit of attending summer camp: being outdoors.

“Nature deficit disorder” is what happens to young people when they become disconnected from their natural world.

Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods,” coined the term and believes the lack of exposure to nature contributes to some of the most disturbing childhood trends. These trends include depression, attention disorders and a rise in obesity.

Americans are spending less time in nature. According to Oliver Pergams, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Americans are participating in activities such as fishing and camping 18 percent to 25 percent less than they did in the early 1980s. State and national parks report a decrease in visitors as well.

In one study, young people were able to name 1,000 corporate logos but only 10 plant and tree species. Additionally, children ages 6 to 11 spend 30 hours a week watching television, a 400 percent increase over the last several years.

On average, American children are spending only 30 minutes of unstructured time outdoors each week.

T. Berry Brazelton, an influential pediatrician and a clinical professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, is quoted as saying, “The tragedy we are facing in this generation is that there is no time for children to explore, to play, to go outside.”

Brazelton believes outdoor play lets children “find themselves, find out what they’re like as people, find what works and what doesn’t work.”

Why should we be concerned about these trends?

First, how can we expect children to help protect nature when they don’t appreciate it? Conservation efforts will be even more daunting when future generations have not had experiences in nature.

What is more important, research shows that being close to nature may increase people’s ability to concentrate, improve the behavior of children with attention disorders and boost science test scores. Taking a walk in the woods, stopping to smell the roses and digging in dirt are good for mental health, learning and brain development.

Exploring nature and experiencing the outdoors allows learners to use higher-order thinking skills, increase vocabulary, make inferences and draw conclusions. Researchers have also found that outdoor play and nature experiences increase children’s self-discipline and cooperation skills.

What can you do for the children in your life who may be suffering from “nature deficit disorder”?

One thing you can do is provide a summer camp experience.

When young people attend a summer camp, they are typically immersed in nature. Playing, eating and even sleeping take place outside.

Everything a young person does at camp is hands-on. When people (young and old) are able to use more than one sense to learn about something, there is a greater chance the information learned will be remembered.

A week in nature will give young people experiences they will remember for a lifetime.

I encourage you to make a summer camp experience possible for young people in your life. The evidence of camp being a positive experience — with benefits for a lifetime — is overwhelming.

Source: Charlotte Observer, NC
http://www.charlotte.com/218/story/635025.html

This story is about having it all. Or for women, more precisely, the challenges of having it all: A career and a family. A new study quantifies what working women are trading away for a full professional life.

Julie Lee is an attorney at an international law firm with offices in San Francisco. She graduated from law school eight years ago and has been totally committed to work ever since.

“I would say that it’s been more than a full-time job. It’s taken priority, pretty much over everything else in my life, including my poor husband.”

It’s also taken priority over having children. And now, at age 37, she thinks it might be time to try. However, she got the message early on — it was an “either-or” proposition.

“When I first graduated from law school and was practicing, I pretty much assumed that I would be working full time. There really wouldn’t be any flexibility.”

In one way at least, Lee represents a striking difference between men and women lawyers. That difference is children.

A new study from Washington & Lee University shows professional women are walking away from motherhood and marriage — more than the general population.

Law professor Robin Wilson’s research makes up a chapter in a new book called Rethinking Business Management.

She says, while four-fifths of senior male lawyers have children, only two-thirds of senior women do, and there is a similar break from marriage.

She looked at more than 100,000 people with at least a college degree, and found that women lawyers, doctors and MBA’s are opting out of marriage at a higher rate than their male counterparts. When they do marry, women professionals have a harder time making it last.

Joan Williams founded the UC Hastings center for work-life law eight years ago. She’s made a career of studying the problem of balancing work and life for women and men.

“Professional men are much more likely to be married to homemakers or women who don’t have the financial withdrawal to leave, even if they want or need to,” says Williams.

Wilson’s research show that among women with a law degree, just shy of 6 percent have a stay-at-home spouse, versus nearly 40 percent of male lawyers. For MBA’s, nearly 10 percent of women have a spouse at home, compared with 44 percent of men. For MD’s it’s just over 12 percent for women versus 48 percent for male MD’s.

As for having families, we asked Williams, what was wrong with careers where you can’t have children.

“There aren’t careers where you can’t have children. There are careers where women can’t have children. So the question is, are we going to design careers so that only men can have them if they want a conventional family life? Or are we going to design careers so that either men or women can have them if they want a conventional family life?”

Williams has written extensively on this. She says, after great gains in the workplace for women in the 1970’s, things began to stall in the 1980s.

“So, the first thing is that if we want to continue to design careers that way, we have to openly acknowledge that that we’re no longer interested in gender equality. The second thing that’s wrong with these “all-or-nothing” careers is that men don’t want them either,” says Williams.

Williams says Gen-x and Gen-y men show signs of being different than their baby-boomer dads. The work-life center hotline is frequently hearing from young men about issues like paternity leave.

Source: abc7news.com, CA
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local&id=6155366

Don Katz has a vision for the kids of America: He wants to take the technology that brings the Jonas Brothers to their ears and use it to deliver the Brothers Grimm.

Nearly a third of children ages 6 to 10 are regular users of digital audio players, according to market research firm the NPD Group. And thanks to entrepreneurs like Katz, they now can use them to listen to bedtime stories.

In March, the Audible.com founder launched AudibleKids.com, where children can download books directly onto their digital audio players.

“I hear lots of people talking, saying that when they put their kids to bed, they put them down with an audiobook,” said Audio Publishers Association president Michele Cobb.

Kids’ and teens’ books accounted for 13 percent of national audiobook sales in 2007, according to the Audio Publishers Association. That’s a relatively small number, but it’s nearly double the 7 percent that was estimated by the group in 2004.

AudibleKids, which offers books for preschoolers on up, aims to stoke their interest further by offering a social networking community where they can talk about books with each other and with parents, teachers and even authors such as R.L. Stine of Goosebumps fame.

Random House’s Listening Library has been producing audiobooks for kids for more than 50 years. What’s new is the digital technology — companies such as Fisher-Price and Disney now sell kid-friendly digital audio players for children as young as 2.

Katz believes that reaching kids through digital media may inspire them to have a lifelong love of books — even the old-fashioned printed kind.

“The world of reluctant readers is huge,” he said. For many children, Katz said, “reading outcomes tend to fall apart around third grade,” which is often the same time that parents stop reading to their kids.

Digital audiobooks, especially those narrated by talented artists, can “extend the pleasure of being read to by your parents into fifth, sixth, seventh grades,” he said. And talented artists are lining up to narrate — Macmillan Audio launched a children’s list this spring with narrations by Gwyneth Paltrow and Tony Shaloub.

“Listening is a powerful method to retain the meaning of the story and to turn people on to the concept of well-chosen words,” Katz said. “The interpretation of the reader, that adds layers to it. If you ever enjoyed Charlotte’s Web , to hear Edmund Wilson read it is a transcendent experience.”

For some moms and dads, the idea of kids chatting online about Holden Caulfield instead of Hannah Montana is pretty compelling. But for those who spent their own childhood summers reveling in the crisp pages of paperbacks, there are real concerns about what may be lost if their offspring tackle a summer reading list via MP3.

Even among today’s multitasking teens, listening instead of reading might cause them to lose focus as they half-listen while attempting to reach the next level of Halo 3 and text messaging a friend.

Katz said he isn’t aiming to discourage parents from reading to their children. But with kids so fully embracing the digital age, he believes it’s the best way to reach them.

Source: The Courier News, IL
http://tinyurl.com/6ko9qj

Be it the growing power of rights over duties, feminism over traditionalism, or simply a society that makes it economically feasible to parent as a never-married woman, there is hope that the trend is turning around

It was a symposium on same-sex marriage that cold January day in Vermont, but on the subject of marriage generally, Patrick Fagan’s power-point presentation went much further. There, on a large screen, a bar graph demonstrated how for psychological health, wealth and other optimal outcomes for children, a biological mom and a dad in an intact marriage did the best job.

At the opposite, bottom end of the graph, well past the married stepfamilies, the divorced single parents and the co-habiting couples, was the never-married single mother, whose grim prospects included grinding poverty, little hope of a future marriage and children with behavioural problems that too often led to a life of crime and yet more unwed pregnancy.

The debate among top American academics is over, the distinguished psychologist, one-time presidential appointee on the family and now a Senior Fellow at the Family Research Council in Washington, later told me in a telephone conversation. Though if any doubt remains about the importance of an intact family in a child’s development, a study undertaken by Swedish social scientists and published by Acta Paediatrica in March buries it once and for all. Their systematic review of fathers’ involvement with children from the time they are newborn to the time they are young adults spanned 24 papers from 16 different longitudinal studies from a variety of countries. It concludes that “father engagement reduces the frequency of behavioural problems in boys and psychological problems in young women; it also enhances cognitive development while decreasing criminality and economic disadvantage in low (socio-economic status) families.”

If the United States more generally represents the traditional family and Sweden less-traditional families, the debate about the arrangement that best meets the needs of children would indeed appear to be over: kids need both mothers and fathers. But can the developments of the past half-century be reversed? In that time, the never-married single mother has been Canada’s fastest-rising parenting demographic. And why did these developments occur in the first place?

There was a time when an unwed pregnancy meant a shotgun wedding. It wasn’t the best start to a marriage, but it secured social and other obligations for the child from his parents. It also provided him with a sense of his genetic and social origins — that is, a sense of his identity — and clear role models upon which to build his future behaviour.

The existence of shotgun weddings didn’t preclude what sociologists and Statistics Canada now call lone-parent or one-parent families. These have been an established feature of Canadian familyhood for some time and have included widows, the divorced or separated, as well as never-married mothers. In 1951, for instance, 13.9 per cent of families were lone parents, a figure not far removed from 2006 figures at 15.6 per cent, although, significantly, they fell to 8 per cent between 1951 and 1966.

The difference between then and now is the altered composition of the lone-parent cohort. In 1951, only 1.5 per cent of lone parents were never-married, whereas 30 per cent were divorced or separated and 66.5 per cent were widowed. By 2006, and despite the availability of birth control, abortion and adoption services, the proportion of never-married, at 29.5 per cent, and divorced or separated, at 49.5 per cent, had increased dramatically.

Why?

Conventional wisdom says poverty is the primary cause of never-married mothering, but increasingly evidence suggests both poverty and never-married mothering are symptoms of a deeper problem.

“Although there are many exceptions,” writes Anne-Marie Ambert in a 2006 paper on one-parent families for The Vanier Institute of the Family, “over half of women who bear children alone not only create poverty … but come from poverty.”

The professor emeritus of sociology at York University adds that, in any case, “less than 50 years ago, the poor were not so likely to produce as many one-parent families as is now the case.” And even today, the poor do not uniformly inhabit one-parent families, while the rich do produce one-parent families via divorce and occasionally through intentional single motherhood.

Values, beliefs and morality are also factors, she says, beginning with an ethos of individualism that emphasizes rights rather than duties. This, coupled with an ideology of gratification, particularly sexual and psychological, meant procreation became increasingly separated from marriage even as women, often conspicuously unprepared for motherhood, were encouraged to keep and to bond with their newborns as a “right.”

Add impoverishment, and such adolescents may feel they have little to lose and even something to gain by engaging in unprotected sex.

In 1999, similar views were expressed by Maggie Gallagher, an American author and president of the Institute of Marriage and Public Policy. “What has changed most in recent decades is not who gets pregnant, but who gets married,” she wrote in The Age of Unwed Mothers. If a good marriage is unlikely and if marriage isn’t an essential support to motherhood anyway, she argues, it is hardly surprising adolescent girls decide to become pregnant. “If it is not marriage that confers special meaning to the sexual act, then perhaps it is her giving the gift of unprotected sex, or making a baby.”

British journalist Melanie Phillips agrees that the collapse of marriage is behind today’s changing family fortunes, but she blames “gender” feminism as its primary cause. By viewing marriage as the principle instrument of oppression by males of females, she says, gender feminism marginalized men from their roles as husbands and fathers while its radical agenda has become the stuff of public policy. Meanwhile, fear of appearing judgmental about its consequences has led to moral paralysis on the subject.

Her book, The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, argues that any explanation based on economics — for instance, that a lack of jobs makes young men unmarriageable or that too much welfare makes it too easy for young women to be single mothers — is only a small part of the puzzle. The missing piece is the change in girls’ sexual behaviour and the collapse of social stigma. “The legalizing of abortion and the availability of contraception, along with the changes in social attitudes, brought about the end of ’shot-gun’ marriages by which unmarried sexual incontinence had previously been regulated,” Phillips says.

Fewer men wanted to marry women who, they felt, brought their pregnancy on themselves, while women who did want to marry and have children “found their bargaining position had been undermined since men could go elsewhere for sex without responsibility.” And while men seek sexual favours, it is women who — unless they are being coerced — have the power of selection.

To be sure, mistakes are a factor — but abortion and adoption services exist to address these. Coercion is also a factor in very disadvantaged groups, as is a hyper-sexualized media and celebrity culture that feeds peer pressure and promotes sexual activity.

If women were engaging in more-adventurous sexual behaviours, does that mean men were feckless cads? Not entirely, says Phillips. “All societies struggle with the problem of attaching men to their children,” she writes. “This is almost always solved through marriage and legitimacy, which is very important in establishing paternal certainty, the most important precondition for paternal investment.” Moreover, she says, family life socializes young men, who must get jobs and settle down. It also contributes to the development of kinship, the primary structure that supports individuals.

But now, “marriage has been weakened, divorce has got easier and no stigma is any longer attached to children born outside of wedlock. The result has been a snapping of the bonds that have tied men into family life.”

In Canada, as elsewhere, liberalized divorce laws were adopted by the end of the 1960s. In Britain, says Phillips, they turned marriage into an institution of contempt and “just a piece of paper.” Divorce produced “damaged children (who) grew up into embittered adults incapable of lasting attachments and deeply mistrustful of the institution whose failure had let them down so badly.” The non-existent or low-commitment requirements of lone parenting or co-habitation became a better option than a perceived “bad” marriage while “no-fault” divorce laws that also gave women custody of the children and most of the family assets bestowed “the seal of social approval upon families constructed around the absence of the father.”

In a recent blog item on The Spectator’s website, Phillips discusses the murder of a 15-year-old and the life of her mother and others with several children by several men. An affluent, complacent and materialistic Britain has created an underclass, she writes, “where successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and cherished by both their parents … How can such women know how to parent their own children?”

Similarly, and in the U.S., where 37 per cent of pregnancies are those of unwed, mostly black and Hispanic mothers, commentators describe a de facto caste system based on the marriage gap. In Canada, the proportion of Aboriginal single mother families is twice as high as other Canadian families.

Yet reasons for hope persist. According to “Crime, Drugs, Welfare — And Other Good News,” published in last December’s edition of Commentary magazine, American college graduates are marrying and staying married for the sake of the children, while the number of Canadian fathers who have joint custody of theirs now rivals the never-married mother as Canada’s fastest rising parenting demographic. Abortion and fertility rates among the young are declining.

Many lessons, too, are emerging from the trials and triumphs of the sexual revolution, among them that if feminism’s biggest mistake was the marginalization of men, so, too, has it given women greater control of their sexuality. And that means tremendous power to re-order their lives, the lives of their families and to turn the situation around.

Source: Canada.com, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/5uo7oe

Targets for “toddler technology” skills laid down by the Government, which will require children to master basic computer skills by the age of 4 and understand how to use a television remote control, pose serious risks to child development, experts have said.

Aric Sigman, a psychologist and author of Remotely Controlled, said that the Government’s new early years curriculum, which requires underfives to be taught on computers, risked creating a generation of screen addicts.

Exposure to screen technology during key stages of child development may have counter-productive effects on cognitive processes and learning, particularly language development and competency in reading and maths, Dr Sigman said.

“Legally requiring the introduction of screen technology to 20 to 60-month-old children is likely to lead to even higher levels of daily screen viewing. Early introduction to ICT [information and communications technology] is likely to lead to a greater lifetime dependency on screens,” he said.

The Government’s new early years curriculum, known as the EFYS (Early Years Foundation Stage), will become statutory in all nurseries and childcare settings in England from September. It sets out specific computer-related tasks for underfives.

From the age of 22 months children should “show an interest in ICT. Seek to acquire basic skills in turning on and operating some ICT equipment.” From 30 months schools should “draw young children’s attention to pieces of ICT apparatus they see or they use with adult supervision”.

From 40 months children should “Complete a simple program on a computer. Use ICT to perform simple functions such as selecting a channel on the TV remote control. Use a mouse and keyboard to interact with age-appropriate computer software.”

These goals are set against a background of growing use of IT in state schools at all ages. Dr Sigman said that there was increasing evidence to suggest that this approach carried substantial risks. Supposedly educational DVDs and computer programs were very often nothing of the sort, he said.

He cited a recent study in the Journal of Pediatrics, which found that the use of such software produced no positive effects on children under 2 and might retard language development.

He observed the emergence of a “video deficit” phenomenon whereby young children who have no trouble understanding a task demonstrated in real life often stumble when the same task is shown on screen.Exposure to television and computer games over a long period might also have long-term consequences on children’s ability to concentrate.

Richard House, senior lecturer in psychotherapy and counselling at Roehampton University, said that there was no compelling evidence to support the Government’s view that screen-based learning was good for very young children.

“One would think the Government must have had convincing evidence for incorporating computer and screen technology into legislation that is legally binding for all nursery or child care settings, but none exists,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Families and Schools said it was not mandatory for children to achieve all the learning goals. “The EYFS says that most – though not all – children should have the chance to find out about everyday technology through their play,” she said.

What little surfers will have to know

The Government’s computer literacy goals for children aged 22-36 months
— Acquire basic skills in turning on and operating some ICT equipment
— Talk with carer about what it does, what they can do with it and how to use it safely
— Use the photocopier to copy their own pictures and other equipment such as karaoke machines

Children aged 30-50 months
— Know how to operate simple equipment

Children aged 40-60 months
— Complete a simple computer program
— Use ICT to perform simple functions, such as selecting a channel on TV remote control
— Use a mouse and keyboard to interact with age-appropriate computer software
— Find out about and identify the uses of everyday information and communication technology and use it together with programmable toys to support learning. Click on icons to cause things to happen in a computer program

Source: Times Online, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article3864656.ece

For generations, scholars have debated whether language constrains the ways we think. Now, neuroscientists studying reading disorders have begun to wonder whether the actual character of the text itself may shape the brain.

Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian.

Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal. It’s the same with dyslexia, psychologist Li Hai Tan at Hong Kong Research University and his colleagues reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The problems occur in areas not involved in reading other alphabets.

Using two brain-imaging techniques, they identified striking differences in neural anatomy and brain activity between children able to read and write Chinese easily and classmates struggling to keep pace. Both were at odds with patterns of brain activity among readers of the English alphabet.

Even when readers in both languages looked at the same written characters, the brain activity was different, other researchers found. Arabic numerals of standard arithmetic — used by readers of Chinese and English alike — activate different brain regions depending on which of the two languages people had first learned to read, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China’s Dalian University of Technology reported in 2006.

“In this sense, we may regard dyslexia in Chinese and English as two different brain disorders,” Dr. Tan said, “because completely different brain regions are disrupted. It’s very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English.”

By any measure, reading is a complex and peculiar task. At the speed of thought, readers of English turn letters they see into sounds, sounds into words, and words into meaning. Fluency is measured in milliseconds. Spelling variations are speed bumps in the brain.

Until recently, researchers who study reading abilities focused mostly on Western alphabets. English and 218 other languages, from Alsatian to Zulu, share variations of the same Latin character set. But that set is only one of 60 writing systems used among the world’s remaining 6,912 spoken languages. Even so, those studies convinced many scientists and educators that the brain’s response to the written word, regardless of the language, is universal.

The new research suggests they’re wrong. The schooling required to read English or Chinese may fine-tune neural circuits in distinctive ways.

“We have to recognize that the writing system in China is different, the demands on the brain are different and the characteristics of dyslexia are different,” said Georgetown University pediatric learning specialist Guinevere Eden, who is incoming president of the International Dyslexia Association.

To document the effects on brain development, Dr. Eden and her colleagues are launching a five-year study in Beijing and Washington to compare the neural changes in 60 schoolchildren learning to read either Chinese or English. “Nobody has ever done this across two writing systems,” Dr. Eden said.

In ways that ancient scribes never imagined, text has transformed us. Every brain shaped by reading, whether it is schooled in Chinese or English text, measurably differs — in terms of patterns of energy use and brain structure — from one that has never mastered the written word, comparative brain-imaging studies show. “There are real differences that emerge because of literacy,” Dr. Wolf said.

Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception. In January’s Psychological Science, MIT researchers reported that European-Americans and students from several East Asian cultures, for example, showed different patterns of brain activation when making snap judgments about visual patterns.

No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archaeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization.

“Once you have different writing systems in place,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett. “They may reinforce the perceptual and cognitive trends that preceded the invention of writing. They may go hand in glove.”

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://tinyurl.com/6c4gax